Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  Amber sighed as she settled in at the kitchen table in one of the first free moments after we found ourselves alone together. “How are you feeling?”

  “Almost normal.” I joined her at the table with an equal sigh. “Except for every time I catch a glimpse of my reflection, or notice something that is pinching, or isn’t pinching. How are you holding up?”

  “It comes and goes.” She absently stroked her chin. I suppressed a laugh as her fingers twitched at the touch of her stubble. She snapped her hand back down onto the table. “It’s definitely going to take some adjusting to, though.”

  “That’s true.” I leaned forward, then held my chin in my hand and rubbed my fingers along my cheek. It was supposed to be a not-so-subtle way to tease her. I expected her to watch me enviously. Instead, the smooth feel of the skin under my touch unnerved me so much that I couldn’t help but squeeze my eyes shut and shudder. A second later, I opened my eyes to find that, far from looking envious, she was staring down the top of my shirt, where my tee shirt hung open a little too far. I realized with a start why she was staring—I wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Sorry.” She snapped her gaze back to my eyes. “I really didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s okay.” I sat up and tugged my shirt up to avoid any more awkwardness. “I know what it’s like, remember?”

  “But you’re me!” She stood up, almost knocking her chair to the ground from the sudden movement. “I’m not supposed to be attracted to women! And I’m definitely not supposed to be attracted to... well, my own body!”

  “You’re a man now. I’m pretty sure being attracted to women is one of the side effects of being in my body. And, unfortunately...” I gestured down her front. “It’s going to be hard to hide when you’re, well... distracted... from now on.”

  “Is it always so...” She trailed off as she gestured down, and her ears turned red. “Easy? To get excited?”

  “Men are more visually stimulated than women.” I shrugged. “So, yes, if your experience in my body is anything like mine, it is going to be that easy.”

  “Oh no.” She sank back into her chair as her face grew pale.

  “You’ll get used to it.” I reached forward and squeezed her hand in mine. “And besides, you’re going to have me to help you, right?”

  “Right.” She nodded.

  I paused as I sensed her stiffen at my touch. I couldn’t help but give her hand another squeeze, and she tensed even more. Was it possible?

  “Are you getting more turned on?” I tried to keep a straight face, even as she gulped.

  “It’s the damn perfume you’re wearing.” Her face went even more red.

  “Okay.” I bit my lower lip to stop myself from smiling. I put my hands in my lap and waited for her to calm down.

  After taking a few deep breaths, she spoke up. “Sorry, by the way. About yesterday. I didn’t mean to rough you up like that. I just didn’t expect to see you there, at that hotel. It scared me.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” I said. “You were right. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I was acting like a—”

  “Well, you almost died,” she whispered. “You were in shock.”

  “So, I was thinking.” I changed the subject to break the momentary silence that had settled between us. “If you don’t think there’s going to be a way for us to reverse this...”

  “I don’t. I was going to check with someone on Monday to see what they thought, but I wouldn’t hold out hope they’ll have anything good to tell us.”

  “Then, I think...” I blinked and forced myself to continue. “I think we’re going to have to commit to living each other’s lives. I’ve been thinking of you as Amber, and me as Jake, but that isn’t who we are anymore. I think we have to accept that I’m Amber now, and you’re Jake.”

  “Okay... Amber.” Amber, no, Jake, shivered as he used my new name.

  “Good.” I ignored that my heart was pounding somewhere in my throat and a slight tremble was running through my hands. This next part would be the worst, but I had to be the one to say it. I knew that much. “That also means I need to teach you what you have to do at work, and you have to teach me how to be...”

  “Gravita?”

  “Yes.” I squeezed my eyes shut

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you hate primes.”

  “I don’t hate primes! I don’t mind arbiters. I just... I don’t like rogues.”

  “Are you sure?” He reached out and gripped my hand, forcing me to look at him. His eyes bored into mine as he spoke. “Being an arbiter means you’re going to be dealing with rogues every day. People are going to die, and sometimes, you won’t be able to stop that.”

  “I know what being an arbiter means.”

  “No.” His voice turned to liquid steel as he slowly shook his head. “You can’t know what it’s like. Not until you’ve lived it.”

  “You don’t think I can do it?”

  “I know you can do it. I just don’t know if that’s something I can bear to put you through.”

  “But... I have to.” Goosebumps rose on my arms as I chose my next words carefully. “My whole life, Amb... Jake, I’ve watched primes—no, rogues—tear the world apart, and I’ve been powerless to do anything to stop them. Now that I can do something, I can’t just walk away from that chance. If I can do something, I have to try.”

  “Spoken like a true arbiter.” A smile touched his lips. “Okay, Amber. When do we start?”

  “I want all the extra time I can get.” I stood and stretched. “We have a few hours, so why not now?”

  “Okay. There’s a place only a few blocks from here where I usually train. Do you want to head over there?”

  “We can’t just train here?” I frowned.

  “Not at first. Trust me, you’re going to want to be in a safe place while you’re getting used to those powers.”

  “Fine.” I grabbed my set of keys from the counter.

  “Er.” He pulled the keys out of my hand and replaced them with the other set of keys. “Are you going dressed like that?”

  “What’s wrong with how I’m dressed?” I glanced down at the tee shirt and jeans I was wearing. “Do you want me to put on makeup, or something?”

  “Makeup?” He tilted his head to the side and squared his hands on his hips in a way that made me cringe. “I don’t think we’re ready for that one yet. Besides, I was thinking more along the lines of workout clothes.”

  “Oh.” I nodded to hide that I was sure my face was going red. I turned around and dashed out of the room. “That makes sense. Be back in a sec!”

  Half an hour later, I found myself being led by Jake through a storefront in a dilapidated strip mall I had passed every day on my way to work without a second thought. The cleric behind the counter smiled when he saw me, unfazed by the fact I was wearing compression pants and a lightweight jogging sweater. When he saw Jake, though, his smile faltered.

  “I thought I’d bring my husband this time,” I repeated the line Jake had given me.

  “Of course.” The man’s smile returned as he glanced toward the back of the store. “Today’s been pretty quiet. I think you might be the only one back there.”

  “Good,” Jake said, causing the man to stare. “I mean, I guess I’m a little nervous. Amber only told me a few days ago about her being... well...”

  “Come on, dear.” I grabbed him by the arm and steered him away from the front desk.

  Once we were out of sight of the cleric, Jake led the way to a hallway at the back of the store. We passed the bathrooms and came to a door so old that the individual grains of wood on the paneling stood out starkly in the low light of the hallway, even through a thick coat of cobalt-blue paint. I would have mistaken it for a janitor’s closet had Jake not told me it was more than just that.

  I slipped past him and grabbed the door handle to twist it open, careful to make sure my thumb was in contact wit
h the metal. There was a built-in fingerprint scanner on the handle that would only open for arbiters registered into the system. From what Jake had told me, it would be fine for him to join me in the training facilities, but he wouldn’t be able to get past the door without my biometrics.

  Inside, I was somewhat startled to see that the room looked to be little more than an actual broom closet. A few mops leaned against one wall, and a vacuum and tangle of cords hung down from hooks on the opposite wall.

  He squeezed into the confined space beside me and closed the door behind him. I tried to ignore the fluttering in my stomach at finding myself in such close contact with him. Still, I couldn’t help but stare at his muscular arms as he snaked them around me to fit into the confined space.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I snapped my attention back to his eyes. He was smiling knowingly at my gaze, leaving me with no doubt he knew I had been checking him out. I squirmed under his smile, my stomach fluttering again. What was wrong with me? I had been in that body less than the day before. Why was I suddenly acting like a...well, like a girl? I gulped. Without further comment, he reached up over my head and pulled the chain attached to the lightbulb hanging above us.

  I turned around at the soft hiss behind me to find that the far wall had slid to the side to reveal a bright-lit corridor beyond.

  “That’s surprising.” I raised an eyebrow as he brushed past me and stepped into the corridor. “I wasn’t expecting something out of Star Trek.”

  He laughed and motioned for me to follow. “Government-issue. You can’t expect them to be fifty years behind on everything, right?”

  I followed as he led the way along the lighted corridor until it ended at an elevator. There, I stepped forward again and leaned my head toward a lens built into the wall. After a second of confirmation from the retinal scanner, the down button to the elevator blinked green. He pressed the button, and a few seconds later, the elevator doors slid open.

  “How far down are we going?” I asked as he pressed one of the dozens of buttons along the inside of the elevator.

  “All of the facilities here are more than a quarter-mile underground,” he explained. “It didn’t take the government long to realize a little bit of caution went a long way when it came to training primes. There are four hundred and thirty-five of these administrative hubs spaced out over the US, which means each hub generally supports around seventeen different arbiters. There are around fifty support staff at each of these hubs too, so even though there might not be any arbiters down here today, don’t be surprised if we run into anyone while we’re here.”

  For travelling a quarter mile into the earth, the elevator was faster than I thought it would be. By the time he was done talking, the elevators had opened onto our floor.

  I furrowed my brow as he led us into what looked like a simple square room. “Besides being under a thousand feet of dirt, is there any other reason you brought me here to train?”

  “Yes, but give me one sec. I need to grab a few things first.”

  I waited patiently as he came in and out of the room almost a dozen times, each time bringing in another piece of equipment. I used the time to unzip and pull off my sweater to reveal a simple sports bra underneath. He paused the next time he caught sight of me, and my face went red as I realized he was staring at me unabashedly. I shifted uncomfortably as his gaze seemed to move over every single inch of me, and the motion seemed to break him out of his temporary daze. He blinked and snapped his mouth shut, then looked away at finding me watching him. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not to see that he started to blush at being caught checking me out. Thankfully, we both seemed to decide to let the moment pass without comment, and he resumed tracking in more items to the room. As he worked, I noted that everything he brought in looked at home in a weight room. Well... almost everything.

  “You can’t be serious.” I eyed the boxing gloves and helmets he had brought in on his last trip into the room.

  “We probably won’t get to these today.” He set the boxing equipment in the far corner of the room. “Or if we do, it’ll only be for a few minutes. Still, you’d be surprised how often martial prowess is the determining factor in a fight. Even if you were to master your powers within the next week, I still wouldn’t feel comfortable with you facing rogues without knowing you could handle yourself in a fight without powers. You ready to begin?”

  I glanced around at all the equipment he had brought into the room and appreciated for the first time just how much of his life he had dedicated to becoming an arbiter. I didn’t know very much about what he had gone through—it wasn’t as though the process to become an arbiter was classified or anything, but I had never had the desire to learn any more about arbiters than I had to. Well, no, that wasn’t completely true. There was the time, when I was young enough that I couldn’t know if I was prime or not, when I had fantasized about someday gaining powers and becoming a hero. Even after I was in high school and well past the age where I could manifest powers, I had been obsessed with primes. Of course, all that was before...

  My stomach lurched, and I couldn’t keep the grimace off my face at the painful memory that flashed across my mind. There was good reason why I tried so hard not to think about primes, but I couldn’t possibly do that anymore. Regardless of how hard the path ahead of me would be—and just based on the weights and equipment Jake had tracked in, it would be grueling—I had to go on. My life was going to be inundated with primes from now on. Bad memories or not, I felt, in the deepest part of my soul, the undeniable conviction gnawing at me that I would have to do this. Because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did nothing. I knew what pain and devastation came of people not standing for what was right, no matter the cost. I couldn’t let anything like what happened to me happen to anyone else. Not when I could do something about it. There was nothing else for it. I met his gaze, then gulped.

  “Ready.”

  3

  JAKE’S PREDICTION THAT we wouldn’t need the boxing gloves during that first training session proved to be prophetic. After explaining to me the best he could how my new powers worked and how to access them, he had retreated to the safety of a separate viewing room, then used an intercom to relay his instructions to me.

  I spent the first hour trying without success to tap into the powers that I now possessed. It seemed that, even though I had inadvertently used my powers in my fight with Doctor Quantum, being able to do the same thing on command was beyond me. When I mentioned my frustration to Jake, he seemed sympathetic.

  “I don’t know how you managed to conjure that kind of energy without meaning to,” he admitted, his voice crackling over the intercom. “I don’t think Doctor Quantum thought you would, either. Otherwise, I doubt you’d still be alive right now. What I really can’t get, though, is that from the blast you described, you made negative curvature.”

  “Negative curvature?” I dropped my hand to the side and turned to look at the camera in the corner of the room. “What does that even mean?”

  “Well, gravity as we know it is just curved spacetime. Almost everything we think of as gravity is positively curved spacetime, meaning objects are attracted to each other. You made gravity that repelled objects away from each other.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “You tell me.” He sounded flippant. “Your powers let you manipulate spacetime, and by extension, gravity. How else did you cause that explosion? But we’re moving away from the point here. Can we-”

  “Alright, alright.” I rolled my eyes and turned back around.

  In front of me was a set of two-pound dumbbells. My task was to see if I could lift the dumbbells by reversing the gravity around them. When he had explained the task, he said I could use any weight of dumbbell that I liked, since the gravity I would have to change would be the same regardless of the weight. Still, at the thought that I might succeed and end up with something floating erratically above my head, I had gone with the lightes
t option available.

  I lifted my hand over the dumbbells and tried to remember how I had conjured that gravity when I was facing Doctor Quantum. After another few minutes of me screwing up my face to concentrate, Jake decided to intervene.

  “We only have an hour and a half left,” he announced. “I probably need to work through a weight lifting routine with you to follow this week. But you need to stop trying to tap into your powers before I can come back in.”

  “Wait.” I held up a finger and held my eyes shut in concentration. “Give me one more chance.”

  He didn’t say anything, which was all the answer I needed. I gave up on trying to recreate what I had done before and chose instead to go for a completely different tact. There was gravity all around me. Maybe I couldn’t control it yet, but what if I just tried to feel it?

  I took a steadying breath to try and push every thought out of my mind. After a moment to clear my head, I tried to reach out, imagining that everything around me was glowing with an energy I could feel without seeing. After another minute of concentration, something changed.

  I snapped my eyes open. I wasn’t sure if I was just making it up or not, but it felt like the objects around me were... humming. That was the closest thing I could think of to describe it. The sound—if it could be called that—was so faint, but at the same time, I was sure it was there. Each tune was slightly different, but as I focused on each one, their vibrations became more and more clear and distinct. As I looked around me, I saw faded lines stretching away from everything I could see. The lines had a quality to them that I couldn’t quite define, though the closest thing I could think of was that they looked... purple?

  I gulped as sweat formed on my forehead. Of all the colors, why did it have to be that one?

  All the lines around me branched off into different directions, each one shifting and arching into new paths in tune to the humming from the object they came from. As I tried to focus on the lines, I saw that the most vibrant, violet ones from each of the objects flowed and pulsed downward. As I focused on the tile beneath my feet, I was shocked at what I felt. Compared to the objects around me, the ground was a jack-hammer of energy. Its strength coursed up all around me, nearly overpowering my senses with a purple aura that I could barely focus on without my head swimming.